Food relief shipments to Germany had been prohibited by the U.S. until December 1945, since "they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living to the average of the surrounding European nations".[1][2]
CRALOG was created after the American Council had dispatched a survey team to occupied Germany, which had reported back on the situation in February 1946. CRALOG was then on February 19, 1946, established and designated by the Truman administration in a directive on relief contributions to Germany as the only medium through which aid to the U.S. occupation zone could be channeled.
The survey team had been permitted to visit Germany only after President Truman had been subjected to increased pressure both by the American Congress and public. In January 1946 34 U.S. senators had petitioned that private relief organizations be allowed to help Germany and Austria, stating that the desperate food situation in occupied Germany "presents a picture of such frightful horror as to stagger the imagination, evidence which increasingly marks the United States as an accomplice in a terrible crime against humanity."[3]
The Governors of the Western Allied Occupation Zones in Germany signed contracts permitting CRALOG to provide relief in their respective zones as follows: General Lucius D. Clay, military governor of the U.S. occupation zone signed on January 29, 1946, the UK governor signed on July 12, 1946, and the French on July 30, 1946. The Allied Kommandatura that jointly ruled Berlin signed in April 1947.[4]
A relief worker described the situation encountered in Germany in 1946 as follows:
Starvation is not the dramatic thing one so often reads and imagines... of people in mobs crying for food and falling over in the streets. The starving... those who are dying never say anything and one rarely sees them. They first become listless and weak, they react quickly to cold and chills, they sit staring in their rooms or lie listlessly in their beds... one day they just die. The doctor usually diagno-ses malnutrition and complications resulting therefrom. Old women and kids usually die first because they are weak and are unable to get out and scrounge for the extra food it takes to live. It is pretty hard for an American who has lacked enough food to become ravenously hungry perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime to understand what real starvation is.[5]
The first CRALOG shipment arrived in Bremen harbor in April 1946, and by the termination of the program in 1962, it had dispatched 300,000 tons of aid to Germany.
^The U.S. Army In The Occupation of Germany 1944-1946 by Earl F. Ziemke Footnotes to chapter 23, Further referenced to: (1) Memo, European Section Theater Group, OPD, for L & LD, sub: Establishment of Civilian Director of Relief, 8 Dec 45, in OPD, ABC 336 (sec. IV) (cases 155- ) . (2) OMGUS, Control Office, Hist Br, History of U.S. Military Government in Germany, Public Welfare, 9 Jul 46, in OMGUS 21-3/5.
^"CARE Package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946". (see previous reference)
^Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds. "Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe" ISBN0-88033-995-0. Chapter by Richard Dominic Wiggers, "The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II" p.282,283 Further referenced to: Kenneth S. Wherry, United States Senate, Committee on Appropriations, to the President, 4 January 1946, HST/WHOF/B1272.
^Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds. "Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe" ISBN0-88033-995-0. Chapter by Richard Dominic Wiggers, "The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II" p.282,283 Further referenced to HST/Andrews/30; Testimony of Mr. G.V. Gaevernitz, U.S. Senate, Judiciary, A Bill to Amend the Trading with the Enemy Act, 18 June 1946.
References
Egan, Eileen and Elizabeth Clark Reiss. Transfigured Night. Library of Congress Number 64-7646.
